Kaggle's lessons in building a crowd-sourcing platform

Anthony Goldbloom and Jeremy Howard on engagement and funding lessons

The No. 1 and 2 questions I typically ask start-ups when they're getting started is: How do you plan to market your service and how do you plan on keep customers/users engaged? Kaggle has done an incredible job engaging its users to compete for prizes to solve complex problems. In this interview, I spoke with the founders Anthony Goldbloom, CEO, and Jeremy Howard, Chief Scientist, about how they do that.

Kaggle is a recently-launched start-up with $11 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, as well as Stanford University's endownment, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Google's chief economist Hal Varian and now Google Adsense co-founder Gil Elbaz. Kaggle is solving real-world problems through competitions among the world's biggest brains.

(Editor's note: Vator will be tackling this challenge of engagement and how companies are using game mechanics to keep their users actively interacting with their service/product. See agenda and register here.)

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Kaggle is a platform for data prediction competitions that allows organizations to post their data and have it scrutinized by the world's best data scientists. In exchange for a prize, winning competitors provide the algorithms that beat all other methods of solving a data crunching problem. Most data problems can be framed as a competition.